Asgard's Heart (10 page)

"I think you ought to know," I said, after a
brief pause for consideration, "that the situation may be a lot more
complicated than you suppose. It seems that while I was interfaced with the
Isthomi, and they were involved in some kind of life-or-death struggle,
something got into me. Something may have got into Myrlin and Tulyar, too. I
think something's happening deep inside Asgard which makes the Scarid invasion
look like a very trivial nuisance. The macroworld itself might be in danger—I
can't say for sure. One thing I am sure of, though, is that if the beings we're
involved with now are determined to make pawns of us, we could be in for a far
rougher ride than the Tetrax gave us when
they
hired us as catspaws. There's no way out for me— I'm in too deep—but if you aim
to come out of this mess alive, you might be better off obeying this order and
getting the hell out of Asgard. You'd be safer out of the system."

She looked at me with an expression that was far less
easy to read than those which the Nine's simulacrum had worn.

"You're going to try to make a run for the
Centre," she said, "aren't you?"

"Yes I am," I told her. "I guess I've
been here too long— I've made myself a thoroughgoing sucker for the big
mystery. Anyhow, I don't want to consign myself entirely to 994- Tulyar's
tender care. If I need any other reasons, I also suspect that whatever's got
into me isn't going to let me rest unless I do try to get to the heart of the
matter."

"You were planning to go alone?"

There was no point in dissembling.
"Actually," I said, "I was hoping to take Myrlin. I figured he's
the only one I can trust to the hilt. I think some of the scions will come,
too. I did intend to ask you, because I figured we might need your firepower,
but I wasn't sure you'd be willing. I've asked the Isthomi to build me a vehicle—a
robot on wheels, capable of taking me safely through the levels. They've
started work already."

"You hadn't bothered to take into account, I
suppose, that you're a star-captain in the Star Force, and that I'm your
commanding officer?"

"I guess I'm a deserter through and
through," I confessed—not without a pang of uneasiness. "But I was
going to tell you."

"Jesus!" she said, with more tiredness in
her voice than disgust. "What the hell did I ever do to deserve this command?
Poor Serne got blasted, and all I have left is you and that creep Finn. We
might be standing on the very spot where Khalekhan got killed in action, you
realise that? Where you go, I go. All the way. Got that?"

I found that my mouth was a little bit more open than
it should have been, though not so much that you could say that my jaw had
dropped.

"You want to go to the Centre?" I said.

"I think that if
you
have to go, you surely need someone to look after you. You're not exactly my
idea of a hero,

Rousseau.
Anyhow, running away to the surface would look like cowardice in the face of
the enemy, and that's not my style. We'll go to the Centre, Rousseau—the Star
Force way."

I wondered which of us was volunteering for the
mission; everything seemed slightly cock-eyed, if not entirely upside down. But
what can you expect, when you go through the looking-glass into the magic
world? I had my reservations about the Star Force way, but it was a way that
had saved my neck before.

"994-Tulyar's not going to like it when you tell
him you're not going up," I said.

"The hell with 994-Tulyar," she retorted.
"In fact, the hell with Tetra and everything it ever spawned. From now on,
the ambassadors of the galactic community are you and me, and whatever treasure
we find at the bottom of the hole belongs to humankind. When were you thinking
of starting out?"

"The robot should be nearly ready," I told
her. "The main problem is knowing which way to go. We've got no map of the
levels. The Nine have thrown out a few dark hints about there being more than
one way to get to the Centre, but they haven't explained exactly what they
mean. I'm hoping they'll be able to figure out a way to guide us,
but. ..."

I never got the chance to discuss the doubts and uncertainties
of the matter. The wall behind me exploded, and the Shockwave hurled me head
over heels into the meshes of the Gordian knot.

5

Although
the gravity was low, I wasn't exactly feather-light, and I hit the plants with
a lot of momentum. But the tangled branches turned out to be so tightly
interwoven that I didn't get stuck—in fact, they were so rubbery that I
bounced. I was able to roll forward as I hit them so that I was tumbling like
an acrobat as I continued on my ungainly way.

Shards of the broken wall were flying everywhere,
showering the bell-like flowers and lacerating their petals. I felt a prickling
sensation in my back accompanying the sensation of being hit by the shock-wave,
and knew that I'd been cut in a dozen places. The rolling probably didn't help,
but at least I didn't drive anything between my ribs to administer a fatal stab
in the back.

The noise was tremendous—the big flightless insects
that roamed this overgrown wilderness always screamed with panic when they were
disturbed, and they were certainly disturbed now. I felt them struggling to get
out of the way as I landed on a softer spot, crushing the vegetation down upon
them.

When I stopped rolling I was sprawled on hands and
knees shaded by a huge palmate leaf. I came to my feet as quickly as I could
and looked back at the spot from which I'd been hurled. What kind of petard had
been used to blast the hole I couldn't imagine, but I saw immediately that it
hadn't been quite big enough, because the thing which was struggling to get
through wasn't finding it at all easy.

It wasn't immediately obvious whether it was a living
creature or an artefact. In a bizarre fashion it didn't seem completely out of
place in this world of enormous insects and elephantine flowers because if it
resembled anything I could put a name to, it looked like an immense praying
mantis, with great long legs, a small head carried high, and groping arms,
though the "hands" on the end of the arms looked like a cross between
a crab's pincers and one of the articulated graspers they put on robots
designed to explore places where no human being can go.

It seemed to be made of metal and plastic, but its
joints were as flexible as the joints of a living creature, and the way that
the head was moving from side to side as it tried to get its legs through the
jagged split in the wall was surely suggestive of something searching for a
sight of its prey. The head could swivel through three hundred and sixty degrees,
and it was mounted with four shiny black lenses which probably gave it vision
in depth in all directions. It also had a rigid proboscis that looked ominously
like the barrel of a gun.

But it didn't have vision in depth in all directions
for long, because Susarma Lear had been far enough away on the curving path to
be shielded from the blast, and she already had the Scarid crash gun in her
hand. Whether it was a lucky shot or whether she'd been practising I didn't
know, but the first bullet she fired hit one of those black lenses smack in the
centre, and blew it to smithereens.

One of those grasping hands immediately reached for
her, striking with awesome speed. I had the uncomfortable feeling that if it
had grabbed her it could have broken her in two with its clutch, but the act of
turning sideways jammed the thing firmly in the narrow fissure through which it
was trying to haul its ungainly body, and when the pincers clicked shut at the
limit of the arm's expansion, she was all of ten centimetres out of reach. The
monster spat fire, dragon-fashion, revealing that its proboscis was some kind
of flamer, but the firebolt missed by a couple of metres.

Anyone with an ordinary capacity for fear would have
run like hell, but the colonel was anything but ordinary. She watched the
groping hand close and withdraw, not moving her feet at all, and as soon as she
had the space she put her gun-hand forward again, supporting it at the elbow
with her left, and took a quick but careful sight of that wheel- mounted head.

Her second bullet hit the skull-cap a mere half-centimetre
away from the rim of a second eye, and ricocheted harmlessly away. I couldn't
hear her because of the cacophonous complaints of the insects, but I saw her
lips move and I could easily imagine the manner of her cursing.

I saw—as she must have seen—that the colossal mantis
had taken advantage of the miss to haul a bit more of its bulk through the
scissored cleft in the wall, and that it only needed one last wriggle to get
its entire carcass into the garden. I think I shouted at her to run, but there
was no way she could hear me. As usual, it was an utterly futile gesture,
because she was undoubtedly better at judging these circumstances than I was,
and she wasn't about to hang around for the next flame-bolt or the next
attempted snatch at her midriff. She was already backing away, although she had
the gun raised, anxious to try a third shot if she could balance herself—the
Scarid gun wasn't an easy weapon to use because of the recoil kick.

While I was watching, fearful for
her
life, I'd carelessly forgotten my own
troubles, and it was with a sense of desperate astonishment that I noticed the
second arm flashing out in
my
direction,
ambitious to grab my shoulder and pluck me out of my hidey-hole in the bushes.
Even with its eyes at seventy- five-percent strength, the monster was obviously
capable of paying attention to two targets at once.

I ducked, wishing fervently that for once my reflexes
wouldn't let me down—I had long ago come to the conclusion that I was at the
end of the queue when instincts were handed out, and that the stupid set I'd
been born with was absolutely not to be trusted. But my luck was still holding;
like Susarma, I was just out of reach, and the mechanical grab went back
empty-handed.

Knowing only too well that it would get me next time,
I turned and ran. A purple flower to my left suddenly turned into a firework,
and I knew that the head was pointing my way now. Panic spurred me on, but
running wasn't easy. The plants were just too tightly-packed, and even though
their stems and branches weren't woody at all, they were still capable of
getting in the way.

There was only one thing I could do, and that was to
dive down to the region where the insects lived, beneath the lowest leaves.
There was a narrow space down there where even a man might crawl, if he'd a
mind to. Doing snake- imitations is not usually my kind of thing, but when
death is only a few metres away you have to improvise as best you can.

Flattening myself out, I tried to pull myself along
with my arms and scramble with my feet, almost as though I was pretending to
swim. It was pretty crowded at ground level, because the entire space was
seething with panic-stricken insects that didn't know which way to run, but
were totally committed to the project of getting somewhere fast. They were
still shrieking their hymn of complaint from all sides. I hated the noise, but
I could sympathise with the way they felt.

As I did my silly parody of the breast-stroke I could
feel the muscles in my back protesting. I could feel the stickiness of my
shirt, but couldn't make a guess as to how badly I was bleeding. I took a
little comfort from knowing that the Isthomi were top-flight medical men when
it came to repairing bodies and making people immortal, and that they'd
already made me a promise that they'd wrought some considerable improvements
in the quality of my flesh, but as the pain built to an excruciating level that
comfort seemed to fade away.